Mental health is no longer a challenge we can afford to address at the margins of public health. The recently published Lancet Commission on 21st Century Global Threats to Health identifies poor mental health as one of 17 major threats to human health and well-being through the end of this century, alongside climate change, pandemics, conflict, and other profound global challenges. The message is clear: mental health is not peripheral to our collective future. It is fundamental to it.
For academic public health, this recognition raises an uncomfortable but essential question: How can we improve population mental health if we fail to create environments that protect the mental well-being of our own students, faculty, and staff?
A university can offer counseling, organize wellness events, and encourage self-care while simultaneously sustaining expectations that make well-being difficult to achieve. When academic success depends on constant availability, excessive workloads, and personal sacrifice, institutional practices send a more powerful message than any wellness campaign.
We teach that health is shaped by the conditions in which people live, learn, and work. We challenge our students to look beyond individual behaviors and examine the systems that produce health and illness. Yet we do not always apply those same principles to our own institutions.
A 2025 ASPPH survey of academic public health leaders captured this tension, with respondents describing working nights and weekends as “a necessity, not balance.” That distinction is revealing. When institutional expectations consistently exceed available time and resources, individuals absorb the difference through lost sleep, reduced family time, and diminished opportunities for recovery.
These pressures affect our academic communities in different ways. Students face financial uncertainty, academic demands, and anxiety about their futures. Graduate students and early-career researchers navigate precarious funding and dependence on supervisors. Faculty juggle teaching, research, mentorship, and service. And staff, too often overlooked in discussions of academic well-being, shoulder responsibilities essential to keeping our institutions functioning.
The consequences are not simply individual. They affect institutional performance, creativity, relationships, retention, and ultimately our capacity to fulfill the public health mission.
Supporting mental well-being requires more than asking people to become more resilient. It requires the courage to examine the conditions we create and the willingness to change them.
Commitment Is Not Unlimited Capacity
Public health attracts people who care deeply about making a difference. Our commitment to advancing health equity, generating knowledge, educating future leaders, and serving communities is one of our greatest strengths. But commitment should never be mistaken for unlimited capacity.
We cannot allow dedication to become an excuse for institutional practices that depend on personal sacrifice. A person can be profoundly committed to a mission and still be exhausted by the conditions under which they pursue it.
In my writing on sustainable health systems, I have argued that efficiency alone is insufficient; resilience requires investment in workforce well-being. The same principle applies to academia. An institution that achieves its goals only because its people routinely sacrifice their health is not demonstrating resilience. It is perpetuating a fragile and ultimately unsustainable model.
Of course, individual supports matter. Mindfulness, physical activity, peer connections, and opportunities to recharge can contribute to well-being. Accessible, confidential mental health services are essential and must remain a priority.
But no amount of counseling can compensate for consistently unreasonable workloads. No wellness workshop can resolve inequitable expectations. And no resilience training can substitute for leadership that respects boundaries and creates healthier working conditions.
We must shift our focus from helping people endure unhealthy environments to transforming those environments.
Make Well-Being an Institutional Responsibility
Meaningful change begins when leaders recognize that mental well-being is not simply a personal responsibility or a human resources initiative. It is a strategic institutional priority.
That means integrating well-being into how we plan, allocate resources, evaluate performance, develop leaders, and define success. If we truly believe our people are our greatest asset, our decisions must reflect that.
We should begin by asking difficult questions. When we introduce new priorities, what responsibilities are we willing to reduce or eliminate? Do workload expectations recognize the full scope of teaching, mentorship, research, service, and administrative responsibilities? Do our promotion and recognition systems reward meaningful contributions and collaboration, or do they reinforce a culture that treats doing more as always better?
These questions are especially urgent as academic institutions face financial constraints, shifting enrollment patterns, uncertain research funding, and growing demands for accountability.
We cannot eliminate every external pressure. But uncertainty makes responsible leadership and honest prioritization even more important.
Leadership development is another essential component. We must prepare academic leaders not only to manage budgets, programs, and performance, but also to build environments characterized by trust, inclusion, fairness, and psychological safety.
This includes distributing responsibilities equitably, addressing conflict constructively, recognizing signs of distress, communicating clear expectations, and responding respectfully when someone raises concerns.
We must also rethink our assumptions about availability and productivity. Rest and recovery are not rewards for completing every task. They are necessary conditions for sustained performance, creativity, and good judgment.
Institutional policies should let people disconnect without guilt or professional consequences. Leave should be meaningful. Expectations around after-hours communication should be reasonable and transparent. Coverage arrangements should ensure that one person’s opportunity to recover does not simply transfer an unsustainable burden to another. Equally important, we must create opportunities for everyone to help shape institutional culture.
A graduate student whose future depends on an adviser does not have the same freedom to challenge expectations as a tenured professor. Staff members may hesitate to raise concerns about workloads or workplace practices. Students and early-career professionals may fear that speaking openly could jeopardize opportunities.
Our responsibility is to create safe, credible channels for listening and meaningful participation. And listening alone is not enough. We must demonstrate accountability by communicating what we have heard, what we intend to change, and how we will measure progress.
Our Culture Is Part of Our Curriculum
Academic public health’s responsibility extends far beyond our campuses.
According to the 2024 Public Health Workforce Interests and Needs Survey, 71% of state and local governmental public health workers reported at least one symptom of burnout. This is the workforce many of our graduates will join, strengthen, and eventually lead.
We cannot prepare the next generation to build healthier workplaces while teaching them, through our own practices, that exhaustion is the inevitable price of professional commitment.
Students learn far more than our curricula. They observe how institutions function, how leaders make decisions, how colleagues treat one another, whose contributions are valued, and whether people can succeed without sacrificing their well-being.
Our institutional culture itself is a curriculum.
If students experience environments that celebrate excessive workloads, ignore boundaries, and normalize personal sacrifice, we risk reproducing those same expectations throughout the public health workforce.
But we have an extraordinary opportunity to model a different future. We can demonstrate that ambition and compassion reinforce one another. That excellence and belonging are mutually supportive. That innovation flourishes when people have the time, trust, and resources to think creatively. And that strong leadership is measured not only by what institutions accomplish, but also by how they support the people who make those accomplishments possible.
This is not a call to lower academic standards, diminish ambition, or eliminate the challenges inherent in learning, discovery, and service. It is a call to redefine sustainable excellence.
The most successful institutions should not be those that extract the most effort from their people, but those that create the conditions for people to contribute, grow, innovate, and thrive over their careers.
As academic public health leaders, we have both an opportunity and an obligation to lead by example. The Lancet Commission’s warning about the global threat of poor mental health reminds us that protecting mental well-being is an urgent public health responsibility. That responsibility must begin within our own institutions.
We cannot build a healthier public health workforce while normalizing unhealthy academic environments. And we cannot credibly advocate for healthier societies without demonstrating what healthy institutions can look like.
Excellence should never require exhaustion. As leaders, our challenge is to make that principle a reality, not merely an aspiration.